Continuing the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge…F is for Fathers! I had a lot of different ideas for the letter “F”. Would I write about Family in general, or cheat and use Family Photographs? Or how about the Faith of my ancestors? Or the only “F” surname I have in my tree, Fischer? Or maybe the few Farmers among my ancestors? No, there was only one choice in the end. I’m one of the few American bloggers participating in the challenge, and I’ve been posting my efforts each Sunday. This particular Sunday we celebrate Father’s Day in the United States, and what would family history be without fathers (and mothers)?

Signature of my 2nd great-grandfather on an 1866 baptismal record from Warsaw: Stanisław Piątkowski, ojciec (father)

As I’ve researched my family history, I’ve encountered many kinds of fathers. There were the prolific, such as my 3rd great-grandfather, Jakob Bergmeister, who fathered fifteen children in nineteen years. Back then, the infant mortality rate was much higher, so many of those children died. In more recent times, my one great-grandfather raised six children and my 2nd great-grandfather brought his six to the United States from Poland. I can’t think of any fathers who had only one child, but several had only two. There were young fathers, like my great-grandfather Louis Pater, who was only 18 years old when my grandfather was born. There are also some older fathers, such as my brother and our grand-uncle – both were both less than 3 months shy of 50 years old when their sons were born. Unfortunately in that same grand-uncle’s case, Joseph Perk, he is the only father on my family tree to be deceased when his child was born (one week later). Some fathers in the family lived long lives and got to know their grandchildren, while others died young and barely knew their own children. Some worked hard to provide for their families while others stumbled. But all of the fathers did their best – it’s what fathers do! Here’s to all of the fathers on our family trees!

Continuing the Family History Through the Alphabet series…E is for Ellis Island! Few places in America have the legendary status of Ellis Island. Any family history that includes early 20th century immigrants holds Ellis Island in high regard as the entryway to this country. There were other ports in the United States, but Ellis Island brought the largest number of immigrants to the U.S. and is the most well-known and perhaps the most “romanticized” of the ports that drew, in the words of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to this country.

Ellis Island was only one stop on a very long journey, but because it was the entry point to the United States, it seems to summarize the entire immigrant experience. At some point, my ancestors made a decision to leave their homeland. In some cases, they left their parents and siblings behind and never saw them again. Maybe they left because of economic concerns, or maybe they just had adventurous spirits. All of them, I’m sure, hoped for a better life once they arrived here. As a result of that one decision, they traveled long distances from Germany and Poland to ports throughout Europe: Hamburg and Bremen in Germany, Antwerp in Belgium, and even Southampton in Great Britain. Then the transatlantic journey began – approximately two weeks at sea. Third class steerage was no vacation cruise; quarters were cramped and uncomfortable. Some of my ancestors made the journey alone, including some females, and other female ancestors bravely traveled with their young toddlers. And then…America! Their first glimpse of the new country, their hope for a new life, was Ellis Island. I have no idea what they thought at that moment, but I do know that without that decision, without that journey, without that arrival into a melting pot of a new country with a new language and a new way of life, I would not have been born. Or if my ancestors from different countries did happen to meet elsewhere in the same combination, I would not be American. Therefore, I’m very grateful for their decisions and their journey that brought them to Ellis Island.

Over 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. Fortunately for their descendants who are interested in genealogy, passenger lists were required for each ship. The lists provide a wealth of information, but some years have much more than others. Besides finding out ages, occupations, and occasionally birthplaces, we also sometimes learn the physical descriptions of our ancestors. Without photographs, learning the person’s height, hair and eye color, and complexion allows us to mentally picture these travelers. The lists make the stories “real” – the first time I found one of my ancestors on a passenger list (on microfilm in pre-digital days), I let out a whoop of joy and did a genealogical happy dance. Those names I learned were really real! That’s how my family research began – finding my family’s American beginnings in Ellis Island’s records.

I finally took my own journey to Ellis Island in the summer of 2010 with five genealogist friends. It was a wonderful experience. I was surprised the “Great Hall” was not quite as large as it looks in photographs. What made our trip meaningful was that all of us had ancestors who arrived through that port and the realization that their fateful decision to come here shaped our own lives.

My Ellis Island Immigrants

Piontkowski (Piątkowski) Family

Husband Jan (34) on 04 March 1906 on SS Pennsylvania from Hamburg

Wife Rozalia (41) and children Jozef (3) and Janina (1) on 09 November 1906 on SS Armenia from Hamburg

Bergmeister Family

Husband Josef, my first direct ancestor immigrant to the United States, actually arrived via the port of Philadelphia in 1900.

Wife Marie (26) and daughter Marie (3) on 27 June 1901 on SS Kensington from Antwerp

Continuing the Family History Through the Alphabet series…D is for Double Cousins! The term “double cousin” applies when cousins share ancestry through more than one line. For example, if siblings from one family marry siblings in another family, the couples’ children are first cousins through both their father’s side and their mother’s side; hence: double cousins! Double first cousins share both sets of grandparents whereas “regular” first cousins share one set.

Elizabeth and Stanley Zawodny

So far I’ve only found one instance of double cousins in my own family. My grandmother, Mae Zawodny Pater, had a brother and a sister that married siblings in the Tiernan family. Helen Zawodny (1905-1977) was the daughter of Joseph and Laura Zawodny. Helen married John Tiernan (1901-1960), the son of Thomas and Sarah Tiernan, in 1923.

In 1930, Helen’s younger brother, Stanley (1909-1980), was living with Helen and John. In 1934, Stanley married John’s younger sister, Elizabeth (1911-1999). Therefore, the children of Helen & John and Stanley & Elizabeth are double cousins. Stanley and Elizabeth had three children (after the surname changed from Zawodny to Zowney) – all are still living today so I won’t name them for privacy reasons. Helen and John only had one child, Thomas, but unfortunately he died as a young child. Therefore the double cousin relationship in my family only existed briefly.

Continuing the Family History through the Alphabet series…C is for Census! Federal Census Records are one of the first tools that U.S. researchers turn to when beginning their family history research. It was my first stop when I began my research 23 years ago – back then, the most recent available census at the time was the 1910! I think the census records are even more valuable today.

While census records don’t give you exact dates or vital statistics about your family members, they do provide vital CLUES to assist in further research. The census teaches us:

family relationships – including occasional maiden names if in-laws are living with the family

approximate ages

addresses

occupations

for immigrants, the approximate immigration year and if naturalized or not

How accurate is the information? Well, in my family that all depends on several factors, including who provided the info, how well the informant understood English, and how close to the “event” they were at the time (for example, the immigration year is more likely to be correct five years later than 25 years later).

I’ve found a lot of family members in quite a few federal censuses, so I’ve created some rules – of course, they may only apply to my family, who tend to shy away from being “found” by future generations. But perhaps I’m not alone, so I present Donna’s Census Rules:

2. Rule #1 is applied more vigorously in instances where the wife is older than the husband. Although the wife was older in one set of my grandparents, two sets of greats, and my 2nd great-grandparents, she is always either the same age as the husband or younger so as to prevent the raised eyebrows of the neighbors.

3. Just because adult children are listed with their parents doesn’t actually mean they live there, it just means the parents misunderstood the question. Keep looking, because you’ll probably find them listed elsewhere on their own. My family has inflated the official population number for decades with this rule!

4. The spelling of immigrant surnames are irrelevant for the first 25-30 or so years after immigration, then enumerators finally get it right. Overall, the 1940 census has been the most accurate with both names and ages for all of my ancestors.

So there you have it….researching census records can be a wild, fun ride. You never know what you’ll find, but one thing’s for sure – there’s always a “happy dance” involved when you find your ancestor! Maybe someday I’ll get to explore census records for other countries, too!

Continuing the Family History through the Alphabet Challenge… B is for Bavaria (or Bayern in German). I’ve occasionally been asked why I identify myself as having Polish and Bavarian ancestry instead of Polish and German. Germany was unified as a nation in 1871, a mere 2 years before my great-grandfather was born and 4 years before my great-grandmother was born. They were born in the Kingdom of Bavaria, a state within the German Empire. So yes, my great-grandparents were born in Germany. But the roots of their ancestry are Bavarian! For hundreds of years their ancestors lived in Bavaria – not a small part of a German nation, but an indpendent nation of its own.

I like to describe how my ancestors’ Bavaria relates to Germany by comparing it to how the state of Texas relates to the rest of the United States. Like the southern state, Bavaria covers a large area, they “talk funny” and use different colloquial expressions, they want to secede from the union, they have many strange local traditions, and they are fiercely proud of their heritage. Oh, and they’re very friendly, too!

Bavaria as a political region has roots back to the late 5th Century when it was recognized as a Duchy. In the 17th and 18th centuries the area was known as the Electorate of Bavaria. Then, in 1806, Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire and Bavaria became the Kingdom of Bavaria. Even when Bavaria became a part of the newly formed German Empire in 1871, it still retained its name of “Kingdom” and had some special rights within the Empire such as its own Army, postal service, and railways. Throughout Bavaria’s history, it’s borders changed somewhat. It even once included Tirol, now in Austria, and Südtirol, now in northern Italy.

My ancestors mostly lived in the part of Bavaria known as “Upper Bavaria” or Oberbayern. Upper Bavaria is the southern part of Bavaria, and is called “Upper” because it is higher above sea level than the rest of Bavaria. The area includes the capital city of Munich (München) and some of the sights and events that Bavaria is most known for such as King Ludwig’s fairy tale castles and the Oktoberfest celebration.

Since Bavaria is Germany’s largest state comprising 20% of its total area and is the second most populous state, I wonder why there are not more Bavarian geneabloggers. Surely there are more people tracing their Bavarian ancestry! For more information on researching your Bavarian ancestors, see Bavaria GenWeb or the Genealogy Forum Bavaria.

Even though my ancestry is only 1/4 Bavarian, I have fully embraced my Bavarian roots. I love Bavaria and the Bavarian people! Give me lederhosen, weisswurst and pretzels (only if the pretzels are made by my Bergmeister cousins’ bakery), “Mad” Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein castle, and pitcher-size servings of beer any day because I’m Bavarian!

Umlauts and ogoneks and carons… ог мий (oh my)! *

I decided to attempt the “Family History through the Alphabet” Challenge prompted by Gould Genealogy. I normally don’t participate in weekly themes, but this one allows for creativity since each individual chooses a topic (one letter per week) that pertains to their own family history. And it will definitely be challenging based on the amount of time it took me to come up with a word for the letter “A”. A is for…Alphabets! In learning the basics of a few other languages as part of my family history research, I’ve had to learn a few new alphabets that go beyond the ABCs I’ve known since childhood.

The first foreign records I researched were in German. Fortunately, the German alphabet is essentially the same as the English alphabet but there are four extra letters: ä, ö, ü, and ß. These are sometimes substituted with ae, oe, ue, and ss, so these new letters were not so difficult to learn. With regard to alphabetical order, these letters are usually mixed in with their base letter (a, o, u, and s) but sometimes placed afterwards. Although the order of the German alphabet is exactly the same as in English, I have found that occasionally books may have a name index that combines like-sounding letters. In one genealogy-related German book (a häuserchronik), the index order is: A, B/P, K/C, D/T, E, F/V, G, H, I/J, L, M, N, O, R, S, U, W, Z. This is likely because surname spellings were flexible until more recent times, so Bergmeister was once Per(g)meister and Fischer may have been Vischer.

The next alphabet I had to learn was Polish. The Polish alphabet has 9 vowels and 23 consonants. Letters not found in English include: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, and ż. There is no English q, v, or x in Polish. And yes, there are 3 forms of “Z” – z, ź, and ż. The most critical thing to learn about these new letters is alphabetical order – they are not mixed in with their base letter counterparts but instead follow them in order. So if a surname begins with the letter Ś like Ślesinski, it will be found in an index after all of the surnames that begin with S. It was also important to know what these letters sound like because they have no English equivalent. That is why my original surname, Piątkowski, “translates” into English as Piontkowski – the letter “ą” sounds like “on” in English. (How it became Pointkouski is best left to another post!)

Just when I mastered the Polish alphabet, along came the need to know Russian since many of my Polish ancestors came from the Russian-partitioned part of Poland. The Russian alphabet was not nearly as easy as either German or Polish, because Russian uses Cyrillic letters, not Latin. I still can’t figure it out, quite frankly. There are 33 letters, and while each letter has an English equivalent, genealogists have to realize that alphabetical order in Russian won’t be A, B, C, D, but instead A, Б, B, Г (in English: A, B, V, G). I find the Cyrillic letters very confusing, especially when trying to translate a name that uses the Polish alphabet into Russian. Steve Morse’s site has several language tools that help researchers “translate” into the foreign types, both printed and handwritten. The name Piątkowski becomes Питковский in Russian. I think; it’s all Greek to me.

Just when I thought my family history led me to all the alphabets I could possibly master, recently a new one has appeared…Czech! I am just beginning to find out more about my Bohemian ancestry. The Czech language has 31 different letters, and while it may look a little like Polish, there are some entirely different letters like č, ď, and several more. So my Polish-born Elżbieta would be Alžběta in her parents’ Czech language.

If I had only known in high school how important alphabets and languages would be to my future as a genealogist, maybe I would not have studied French and Italian – great languages for countries in which I have no ancestry. Fortunately, the Latin I took did come in handy for Catholic records in both Germany and Poland before the records were written in the native languages!